


Ficlets in Yellow

by Miss_M



Category: True Detective
Genre: Ficlet Collection, Gen, Implied Slash, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 07:33:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3166661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust adjusts to life after Carcosa. Its long shadow still lies over him and Marty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. him who eats time

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing.

Sometimes when he can’t sleep, Rust goes and stands outside Marty’s house. 

He stands on the lawn and waits for the first dawn breeze, cool even on the hottest of Louisiana days. He thinks about the hurricanes which scour this land clean but do not make it new every couple of years, storms bearing human names because man is the source of all evil. The land is too flat and soggy, always shifting, and the sky’s too big, nothing to prop it up. It was the same in Alaska, the stars so bright and the sky so deep they dwarfed the mountains, shrank the lightless ocean. If that and what Rust has seen out in the black don’t make a man believe in god, nothing will. 

The family across the street once called the cops when they got up to go to work and saw Rust standing there in his underpants and Marty’s old bathrobe, so old and soft with washing Maggie probably bought it for him. The patrol car only left after Rust mentioned he used to be a cop, like that was a guarantee of any fucking thing or a condition which ceased. Walk away and you stop being a cop, spend time in a mental hospital and get the crazy cured right out of you. Bullshit.

It ain’t an insult to call a man staring at the setting moon a lunatic, and it ain’t possible to cure someone of themselves.

Rust stands on the lawn, ants and sharp blades of sun-parched grass under his bare feet, and imagines how he would look from above. His whole life happening all at once as he waits for the breeze which seems to shake the world and rouse it to keep spinning, always going in a circle.


	2. the prophet of truth

Once Rust’s stitches are out, Marty refrains from passing comment when Rust mows his lawn. The effort of not speaking ruins Marty’s relaxed pose as he lounges on the shaded porch, while sweat drips into Rust’s eyes and makes his upper lip itch. 

Marty opens the cooler and hands Rust a cold one after the job’s done and they’re sitting on the porch, no doubt looking to any idle observer as domestic as a pair of old cats, fur thinning in spots. 

“Errol Childress believed he knew a great and terrible secret of the world,” Rust says, eyes slit against the sunlight, inhaling cut grass and earth and gas fumes.

Marty puts down his bottle without taking a swig. “Jesus Christ. Don’t you ever get tired, man? Turn down the volume and drink your beer.”

Rust does. The beer slides down his throat smooth as a lizard, raising goose bumps on his arms despite the day’s heat. “‘Course, all he could think to do with that belief was to create an abomination.” 

Marty sighs loudly, shakes his head. 

“A charnel house.” Rust tilts his head back for a long swallow. 

“Errol Childress was an inbred, deranged son of a bitch, who liked to play with dead people like they were paper dolls. That’s what made him _him_ , Rust. He thought he knew something about the world, but the world wanted nothing to do with him. Now drink your beer or I’ll take this entire goddamn six pack and ram it clean up your ass, see if that don’t make you shut up.”

Rust lets a tactical five seconds tick by, punctuated by screeching cicadas. “Remember the last time you wanted to fight me, how that went down for you?”

Marty glares at his profile, the glare worn threadbare with frequent use. Rust smiles a little, with just the corner of his mouth, the one Marty can’t see. These memories, they almost don’t hurt to joke about anymore.

“Lawn looks good now,” Rust comments.

Marty weighs this, thumbnail picking at the label on his bottle.

“Yep. That it does.”


	3. black stars

Dora Lange was a used-up junkie whore with a five-year-old’s handwriting and an abused mind’s predilection for fairytales. In her journal, she wrote about the Yellow King striding through the forest and the tall grass. Rust would like to remember reading that and feel nothing. 

After what he saw in Errol Childress’ secret place and Marty helped him get away from that hospital under the starlit sky, Rust often lies awake at night.

Marty’s couch is lumpy and uneven. Rust can hear its proprietor through the thin wall, snoring like an Alaskan sawmill. The ibuprofen Marty insisted he take has got nothing on morphine or heroin or bourbon or any other sweet poison Rust used to swallow, shoot up or stuff up his nose. 

So he lies awake and tastes how his healing flesh hurts, like the devil Marty claims to believe in. Through the open blinds, he watches the stars over the house across the street, mostly unobscured by light pollution out here in the new suburbs, in barely subdued swampland. Weeds pushing through the concrete. 

Before, Rust had difficulty sleeping. Now he is reluctant to let sleep come and claim him. 

Some nights, the sky still looks mighty dark. 

Some nights, Rust dare not sleep at all. Not because he will dream. Since he survived Carcosa, his dreams leave him feeling warm and in need of a quiet cry. 

Because for the first time in a long time – as long as he can remember, maybe forever – he fears what he always used to take for granted. That if he slept, he might wake to a place gone wholly dark, in which men like Childress, the Tuttle clan, and all their ilk reign over a huddled world, kings dressed in robes of white and yellow silk.


	4. the pallid mask

The mask of self-deception everyone wears gets lifted, in the dark, alone, out in the bayou where time stands still and always has, where the water is motionless and two-dimensional, impossible to reach through to its bottom and discover what’s there. 

These are the kinds of thoughts Rust has when he and Marty return from a bender and Marty somehow manages to come down with pneumonia. In Louisiana, for fuck’s sake! 

After he’s sweated out the worst of the fever, Rust shakes him awake. Marty lurches halfway up, punches Rust in the shoulder, mutters about a moon face seen through clouds like rips in a tattered cloak.

“Come on, you asshole, you’re getting up to take a piss and a shower, and I ain’t carrying you,” Rust grunts, wrestling Marty out of bed, favoring his throbbing shoulder. 

“I was right about you: if sons of bitches had a prince, you’d be it, Rust. After I as good as carried you outta that hospital.” Marty’s upright and ambulatory, still complaining between sandpapery coughs. “I shoulda left you there to rot.”

“Yeah, that was your big fucking mistake. Go on, get.” 

Clean, back in his bed, and out like a light, Marty ain’t no sleeping fucking prince, still and perfect as a marble statue with a living heart. Not this lying hypocrite who brought Rust to his solitary house, not really a home, and let him stay.

Rust does not understand it. These days, the absence of understanding is easier to shoulder than before. Rust still stares into his own eyes in Marty’s bathroom mirror first thing in the morning, but he doesn’t expect to gain any insight. It’s just a habit, a remnant of what he’d been before Errol Childress’ knife ripped through him and opened up new pathways. A hope, small and brief and stubborn as a lit match in the darkness.

So Rust stays.


	5. little priest

Unlike most everyone, Rust never forgets that the heart is a muscle, not a piece of blown glass. It serves the central nervous system, part of the body’s life support. Neither more nor less meaningful. 

He didn’t think there was anything left to break after Sophia’s death anyway. 

On those rare occasions when Marty’s daughters visit – still more frequent than they used to be, judging from how Marty fusses and cleans the house, though he never thinks to vacuum the stairs or clean the bathroom mirror, spotted as a toad – Rust makes himself scarce, picks a direction at random and drives until his tank is nearly dry. Everywhere the wash of cheap neon and the aftertaste of beer are the same. 

One time Marty mentions that Audrey’s car wouldn’t start – as if Rust could have missed the Volkswagen Beetle painted an ironic powder blue blocking the driveway – so Maggie picked up the girls. Rust concludes it’s just as well, for the sake of the abused knot of muscle in his chest, that he didn’t hang around for that. 

Some hurts, you never let go. Some hurts, you don’t want to.


	6. the living god

Standing in the checkout line with bottles and frozen food and a bag of apples straining his arms, Rust scans the newspaper rack for lack of anything more important to look at. 

On the front page of _The Advocate_ , Senator Edwin Tuttle is a florid man in a pale gray suit, big and broad like his cousin, the late Billy Lee. Tuttle’s face is blank as a paper carnival mask, all-concealing, hope and loathing projected onto it.

Rust can’t stop looking at the men who pass him in the street or sit farther down the bar, can’t stop sizing them up and wondering: was he one? Or he? How about that one? Behind the animal masks, pricks out, pretending they were taking part in a ritual and not just getting off.

Rust abandons the food and beer on the floor by the register, drives to a bar he knows, spends the grocery money on oblivion in a tiny plastic bag, just so he won’t keep seeing men in masks wherever he rests his eyes. His head fills with obliterating white light. 

Marty bitches him out when he drags himself home, joints aching, brain turned to steel wool and scratching at the inside of his skull.

“You know something, Rust? For such a clever goatfucker, you’re a bona fide idiot,” Marty scolds as he forces a moth-eaten afghan in lurid pinks and purples on Rust, probably an old craft project of Audrey or Maisie’s, misplaced or stolen during the divorce.

“Open a goddamn window, mother hen,” Rust grits out, his jaw rusted shut. He can’t stop shivering. 

The breeze through the window is swamp air, warm and fetid, stinking of gasoline, putrefaction, violence. It cools Rust’s face like wind across a glacial lake, green and frigid even in high summer, first numbing the young skin on his cheeks, uncoarsened by stubble, then making him tingle all over. 

Sometimes Rust wakes in the dark, and he cannot move. He can hear Marty breathing, he can feel the sheets on his skin, but he can’t move his limbs or his tongue. The night melts over him and hardens, a beetle’s carapace covering his face, an eyeless death mask.

Those nights, it’s easier to get up and start drinking before daybreak or wake Marty, crabby as he always is to be woken at the dead end of night, than to lie there remembering that falling stars are nothing but meteorites, an annihilating shower of them the least that man deserves. Convinced that the only reason the light seems to be winning is because the stars are clustering together like a raised fist. 

Even if everything repeats, time runs faster when Rust is upright, able to move, to think. He can pretend he is a pivot, not just dust waiting to be ground even finer and scattered. 

In the inky, smudged darkness before dawn, Rust shuffles around the kitchen without turning on a light. Paper filter, cup, sloshing bottle, ashtray: a survival kit of sorts. Rust waits for the coffee to brew and chafes under his choices: to live and hasten the sunrise along.


End file.
